Once the receptive skills have been established by means of listening and reading, speaking and writing can be undertaken and developed toward communicative fluency. Often teachers focus on the goal of language production and forget the prerequisite importance of the receptive skills. Listening and reading provide the means for acquiring additional vocabulary and new language structures. Therefore, the teacher needs to be most careful that the students have the means before he asks them to continue in language learning toward speaking and writing. Without having made the first step, they will be unable to take the second. Unless they have the ability to decode an incoming message, they certainly cannot be expected to encode an outgoing one.
The component parts of language are the same for the receptive and the productive oral skills and for the receptive and the productive written skills. These components, i.e., phonology, semantics, and syntax, provide the basis for interrelating the four languge skills. The students' knowledge of vocabulary and structure can be deepened by studying vocabulary and structure in all four language skills. In this fashion each language skill can complement the other. Encountering new words and grammar to be learned in both listening and reading exercises and practicing the same forms in each of language's productive manifestations enable the students to achieve a greater degree of language mastery than could ever be accomplished by insisting upon either oral or written activities alone.
The fact that the components of language are the same for the receptive and the productive skills has led many teachers to assume that the step from comprehension to usage or from oral skills to written skills or vice versa is a small one. Such is not the case. Even though the building blocks are identical, each skill has to be practiced separately. Students, for example, who can understand vocabulary and structure when used by someone else have not necessarily incorporated them into their own speech. Students who can do a pattern drill orally with no errors and little hesitation may not be able to write the same forms correctly. Students who can read an assigned story with ease and almost total comprehension may not be able to discuss the content in class afterwards. Therefore, teachers need to be constantly aware of their obligation to provide practice in all four language skills.
In all facets of language learning and teaching, one of the key concepts is sequencing. The preceding discussion emphasizes the sequential relationship
Listening Comprehension 281
existing among the four language skills. Listening comprehension precedes and serves as a basis for speaking. A similar relationship exists between reading and writing. The teacher should be aware that it is the students' knowledge of the phonology, semantics, and syntax in listening that is activated to produce speech, and that it is the students' knowledge of semantics and syntax in reading that is activated to produce written communication.